Stephen Billing’s Blog

I was paid a compliment last night when someone said that I was smooth in the way I handle challenges or questions of my approach and ideas. She said that I seem to be able to avoid resistance in the way I work with clients and staff. She also said that she finds others get uncomfortable when she asks questions, and I know that feeling well. 

I was pleased she said that, because it reminded me that it wasn’t always that way. I still feel exposed in this area quite often. In the past I’ve been known for my bluntness and for drilling in on things that make others uncomfortable. 

I have worked to develop my skills in this area. One thing that has helped greatly in dealing with tricky situations has been that I have come to see my work with clients as a process of joint enquiry. What I mean by this is that I take the position that the other person has a viewpoint to offer and I have a viewpoint to offer. If they are different, then a discussion about them offers the possibility for a new viewpoint to emerge. And changing viewpoints is the essence of organisational change. 

When you notice others feeling uncomfortable with a line of questioning, or a conversation do you:

a)    back off

b)    drill deeper

c)    comment on the discomfort

d)    other

My natural tendency is to drill deeper,  and while this can sometimes be a good thing, it also can get me into trouble at times.

I am finding that people have recently been saying to me that conversations with me have been helpful, that they have helped them to see the situation differently. As an organisational change practitioner I interpret this as meaning that there are now different options available for proceeding from what there were before our conversation. 

While I feel flattered by comments like these, I have been struck how much more frequently they seem to be coming up at the moment. I am wondering about why this might be so. Although I would like to attribute it to some amazing insight or characteristic that I and I alone have, I also notice that these insights occur only through conversation and they do not occur in every conversation I have, or even in most conversations. They are rare enough to be noteworthy.   

As I reflect on these recent experiences I am realizing that I am developing an increasing interest in what is going on right now in my client organisations and in my own life at the present moment. This is quite different from the usual gap analysis approach that pays more attention to the desired future and how to generate a map to lead us there. The gap analysis approach leads us to concentrate on what we should be doing rather than what is actually happening now. 

I am more interested in exploring in detail what is going on now and then considering what the next step is. This requires considerable flexibility from both parties as the picture of what is going on can change dramatically upon reflection after significant events.  

I thank Ralph Stacey, the supervisor of my doctorate, for helping me to develop my ability to reflect on what is happening in my client organisations. 

This approach forces me to conclude that these positive feedback experiences are not be due to some intrinsic special characteristic of me that is innate, nor is it my particular professional skills, although undoubtedly my natural inclinations and professional training play a part. I am forced instead to conclude that the new perspective that emerges from these conversations about what is currently going on are a characteristic of the relating between me and the other person that leads to this experience of having been a party to a new way of thinking about the particular situation we are in together.

When workshops are conducted and one of the reasons for them is somehow to facilitate change, then the workshop must generate new conversations. If no change in the conversations, then no organisational change. Participants must be able to talk to each other and take up new themes of conversation in the session. If they are not talking to each other then new conversations are not happening; in fact no conversations are happening. And then no change can happen through that workshop. 

This leaves the facilitator with a problem. The problem of how to ensure the session’s objectives are met. This is a problem because the client, who is paying the bill, has expectations and intentions, and the facilitator has to deliver something that has been agreed in advance. And yet I am saying that the facilitator cannot control the conversations in the workshop. How can the facilitator deliver what has been promised? 

Many facilitators deal with this dilemma by attempting to design the interactions in advance in order to meet the objectives. Coupled with this, they attempt to create their facilitation style in advance, for example by selecting a combination of directive and non-directive exercises. John Heron has a good articulation of the possibilities, by describing a range of 6 dimensions and 3 modes of facilitation coming together in an 18 box matrix. 

On the other hand, I am saying that the actual style of facilitators arises from their intentions (including their intentions about what particular style they seek to have) interwoven with the various intentions of the participants and the interactions between participants and facilitator. Therefore the facilitator is still a participant in these interactions, engaged to a greater or lesser extent. And yet there seems to be reluctance on the part of many facilitators I know to be more engaged with group participants. The role of engaged participant is a different one and represents a change in the power dynamic between facilitator and group members. If the facilitator is strongly directing the activities, asking the questions and writing on the flipchart, then they are in a very powerful position and that power differential is emphasised by these techniques. The interactions that are possible in this dynamic will be different from those where the power differential is not so obvious. 

If the facilitator participates as an engaged member of the group this de-emphasises the power differential and exposes the facilitator to some risk. There is the risk that the conversation might go into areas where the facilitator does not know the answers, and hence might not be seen as authoritative. There is also the risk that the group might lose confidence in a facilitator who does not know the answers. 

Facilitators would do well to reflect on their willingness to risk venturing into this unknown territory where the power balance is not tilted towards the facilitator. Likewise clients would do well to question people they engage as facilitators as to the degree of involvement with their participants that they profess to have. And then monitor practice to see whether it matches up.

I have been talking with a facilitator friend of mine recently about how often people working in break out groups can get off lightly without really engaging. Participants can take an activity quite lightly, skirting away from aspects that are challenging. Then afterwards they can say, ‘Well, that wasn’t much benefit”. But you as a manager know that if they talked about real situations and challenged themselves then they would get a lot more out of the activity.

It strikes me that you could say that these facilitation techniques of breaking people into small groups to undertake highly designed interactions are attempting to get people to have meaningful conversations with each other where the facilitator is not involved.

In order to make sure the conversations are meaningful, they are designed by the facilitator, with parameters, time constraints, questions to answer or structured activities to do. In these activities, the participants, who are people like the facilitator, have to have designed interaction to achieve the facilitator’s outcome. These designed interactions are unlike any they have outside the workshop setting. Imagine a group of people having coffee saying "let’s tell a story one sentence at a time where you only give positive feedback".

In these small group sessions, the facilitator is not really involved in a serious moment-by-moment way with the interactions of the members of the group.

Some facilitators barely get beyond the role of "director of traffic" i.e. getting the participants organised into their activities and giving them instructions.

It seems to me that if we’re facilitating the making of meaning, then we do need to be making meaning WITH our participants. Not just setting up structured interactions where they make meaning themselves but the facilitator stays apart.

Why do I say this? Well, I want to link this to the feel of the interaction, which comes from the work of John Shotter.

He talks about learning to notice the feel of the unique and novel in a person’s action or utterance. If the facilitator is noticing the feel of the interaction, then he or she can draw attention to aspects of novelty that have relevance to the theme of the session. Essentially, if the facilitator is not involved in the conversations, then he or she will not have the feel of the interaction.

Therefore the facilitator will be less effective in facilitating change in these conversations.

Being involved (and detached at the same time, of course) allows facilitators to gauge the feel of the interaction and generate opportunities for change in that conversation. The conversations can then be quite different from what they would have been if the facilitator had not been there.

Think of facilitated sessions you have been involved with. I am sure you have experienced some who act purely as the "director of traffic," giving the instructions for the activities. Have you also experienced a facilitator who engages in the content of the group as well?

What is your opinion about the merits or weaknesses of each approach?

If managers are attempting to facilitate change they must be thinking about who is talking to whom and paying attention to what is new in the conversation during the session. Often members of the group in facilitated workshops do not talk to each other, but rather to the facilitator or to the flipchart – this can also be a problem in therapy groups as well; Yalom points out that the members should “freely interact rather than direct all their comments to or through the therapist.” 

Watch out for facilitators who set up the activities of the group so that they have no choice but to think of ideas to write on a flipchart or to answer the facilitator’s questions, addressing the facilitator and the group but not taking up each other’s ideas. 

What do I mean? Consider the activity of breaking a large group up into small groups, a tactic often used by facilitators in organisational settings. These smaller groupings may be determined in advance by the manager and facilitator, based on who they want to have work together. I’ve seen these groupings indicated in advance on charts with coloured symbols. Alternatively, the groupings could be self-selected on the day. 

The small groups are usually given some form of activity to perform such as answering a series of questions, generating ideas or solving a problem. The results of the small group activity are often recorded on flipchart paper. It is common for the facilitator to get the small groups to present their flipchart ideas back to the larger group.  This is an example of what I mean by talking to the flipchart.

Why? Because group members end up telling the large group what is on their flipchart. The presentation may be relatively interesting or rather dull, depending on the skills of the presenter and the nature of the content. But either way, it is not a lively conversation amongst the participants of the group, it is a one way presentation from the presenter. There is no dialogue going on. 

Here’s the problem. The intention of this activity is to summarise the main points of the small group conversation, which was a conversation between a specific small group of people in a specific situation. The underlying taken-for-granted assumption is that the meaning of the small group conversation can be transferred to the large group through the use of these summaries. 

This is classic sender / receiver model communication where the large group conversation involves the transmission of messages from the small groups. But I think the large group discussion is actually a new conversation and a new situation with a different, specific, although larger group of people in a new situation. The new situation is the big group discussion. The experience of the past conversation in the small group is part of the history that led to the large group conversation but cannot be replayed. 

Recognising that the meaning of the small group exchanges cannot be extracted and summarised for the larger group changes the facilitator’s intentions. It also changes the intentions of the manager hiring the facilitator. To what? 

Managers must consider how their workshop will seed new conversations amongst the group. This means the facilitator could note that participants can read the flipchart for themselves, and ask what the small group talked about. It is noticeable when facilitators do this how often the group say that the important part of their discussion was not recorded on the flipchart at all. 

Recognising the ‘messy’ and repetitive nature of conversation the facilitator can also encourage responses in the large group conversation rather than waiting for questions at the end. This sort of debrief is much easier in a circle or around a table where participants can all see each other rather than in theatre style or other seating arrangements where people cannot see each other. 

Managers facing times of change should not worry about what participants say to the flipchart, but what they say to each other. 

What do you think? 

Yalom I, 2005, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy 5th Edition, Cambridge, MA: Basic Books. Page 124.